FlooNoC: A Multi-Tbps Wide NoC for Heterogeneous AXI4 Traffic

Abstract: Meeting the staggering bandwidth requirements of today's applications challenges the traditional narrow and serialized NoCs, which hit hard bounds on the maximum operating frequency. This paper proposes FlooNoC, an open-source, low-latency, fully AXI4-compatible NoC with wide physical channels for latency-tolerant high-bandwidth non-blocking transactions and decoupled latency-critical short messages. We demonstrate the feasibility of wide channels by integrating a 5x5 router and links within a 9-core compute cluster in 12 nm FinFet technology. Our NoC achieves a bandwidth of 629Gbps per link while running at only 1.23 GHz (at 0.19 pJ/B/hop), with just 10% area overhead post layout.